How easy thus to talk—thus to resolve—during the first throes of a wounded vanity—when the spirit is strengthened by its discomfiture. But ah! how difficult to maintain the determination! Hercules had no such task.
I endeavoured to fortify myself with reflection: by conjuring up every thought that might restore my indifference, or enable me to forget her.
It was all to no purpose. Such memories could only be chastened by time.
They were not universally painful. It was something to think that I had interested, even in the slightest degree, one so grand, so famed, so incomparable; and there were moments when the remembrance soothed me. It was but a poor recompense for the sacrifice I had made, and the suffering I endured.
In vain I invoked my pride—my vanity, if you prefer so to call it. It no longer availed me. Crushed in the encounter, it made one last spasmodic attempt, and then sank under a sense of humiliation.
Untrue what I had been told by other tongues. They must have been sheer flatterers, those friends who had called me handsome. Compared with Francisco Moreno, I was as Satyr to Hyperion. So must Dolores have thought? At times, reflecting thus, I could not help feeling vengeful, and dwelling on schemes of retaliation,—of which both were the object. By good fortune none appeared feasible, or even possible. I was helpless as Chatelar, when the sated queen no longer looked lovingly upon him.
There was no hope except in absence—that grand balsam of the broken heart. I knew it by a past experience. Fortune favoured me with the chance of trying it the second time; and soon. Three days after that sweet encounter in the Cathedral—and the bitter one in the Alameda—our bugles summoned us to get ready; and, on the fourth, we commenced moving towards the capital of Mexico.
The counsel I had received from my sage comrade, along with the excitement of opening a new chapter in our campaign, gave temporary relief to my wounded spirit. An untrodden track was before us—new fields of fame—to end in that long anticipated, much talked-of, pleasure: a revel in the “Halls of the Moctezumas!”
To me the prospect had but little attraction: and even this was gone, before we had passed the Piedmont of the Cordillera that overlooks the classic town of Cholula.
On entering the “Black Forest,” whose trees were to screen it from my sight, I turned to take a parting look at the City of the Angels.